Mini-activities: Capacity-building to foster conversations and explore instructional change

This capacity-building project aims to strengthen faculty communities and foster a culture of evidence-based inquiry. The goal is to create readiness for transformation in implementing evidence-based teaching practices and revising STEM curriculum. The project was designed to encourage exploration of student learning and success in introductory and foundational undergraduate STEM courses, including prerequisite math and science courses. While many STEM transformation projects are conducted at large research institutions, this project is implemented at a public, regional, primarily undergraduate institution (PUI) in the Midwest.

The project tests the assumption that providing faculty with multiple ways to explore challenges to student success and evidence-based teaching will cultivate motivation for instructional and curricular change. This poster focuses on the "mini-activities" component of the project. The mini-activities are based on the theory of change of "significant conversations and significant networks" (Roxå and Mårtensson, 2009) to influence faculty as they develop their understanding of the relationship between teaching, student learning, and student success.

The project offers varying "doses" of engagement, from mini-activities and workshops to semester-long faculty learning communities. This poster summarizes the mini-activities developed and implemented each semester, which are brief (15-minute) interactive sessions using a scenario as the context for small group discussions with provided prompts. The mini-activities aim to introduce instructional strategies, facilitate conversations and sharing, and generate interest in faculty communities. These mini-activities have been implemented at college-wide semester kick-off meetings since spring 2021 and are now institutionalized. They are developed using the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework (Winkelmes et al., 2016). Examples of mini-activities include exploring course sequence grades to identify bottlenecks to student retention and reviewing sample syllabus language to identify opportunities to foster growth mindset environments. Insights from the mini-activities and how they shape plans for implementing instructional transformation will be discussed.